“Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body”

“Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.”

“We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.”

“It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans.”

“We all have shit on our shoes. We've just got to realize it so we don't track it into the house.”

“Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all.”

“The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.”